A Merry mic-drop. These are the days of American Evangelicalism’s great revealing: a moral and theological bankruptcy now on stark and vivid display. And in such times it can be tempting to decide it’s all a sham — not just American Evangelicalism, but the faith itself, “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” That is not the case, of course, and the Ghost of Christmas Present, the personification of the Divine and Christmas’s ultimate essence, declares the same… Read more

When nothing makes sense, Christmas still does. So far in this season of Advent, we’ve lit the candles of hope and love. But sometimes both seem so impossibly out of reach. About a year and a half ago, I released a book called The Light is Winning. Strangely, for me personally, the season in which I wrote the book and much of what came after have provided ample evidence to the contrary: that the light isn’t, in fact, winning. (This… Read more

I ain’t your prodigal son. I ain’t your older brother. I’m the servant in the servant’s quarters, cleaning the bathroom floor, setting the table for your party. I was thinking about the prodigal son parable earlier and the typical (often evangelical) presentations of it. The most famous of which is probably Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God. In his outline, the story is about the father (God) who is himself prodigal, spending everything on the wasteful, sinful younger brother when he… Read more

There’s no doubt that we are living in a shifting time. But if the early aughts were about American Christianity emerging, and the 2010’s have been about progressing, it seems to me the next decade might well be about rooting, centering, and building. I’ve lived out this early-millennial era in American Christianity personally, planting a church at the height of that emerging/missional phase, and writing/preaching publicly through all the recent progressing. But despite the crescendo that we seem to have reached… Read more

I was just reminiscing with a friend about one of the greatest seasons of television ever created: the first season of HBO’s True Detective. (Don’t even get me started about season 2.) Just about a year ago, I released a book called The Light is Winning: Why Religion Just Might Bring Us Back to Life, published by Zondervan. The tie-in is this: in the final episode of True Detective season 1, there’s a scene where a battered and bruised detective… Read more

“Blogging is dead,” or so they said. And so they did—content to spatter short-form or visual content across social media rather than spill words in the hundreds for a supposedly waning audience. This drift among former bloggers toward social media as their primary opinion-sharing and community-building outlet is well documented. If you’ve hung around the Christian blogosphere for long enough you’ve seen it; and if you’ve been writing in this space for more than a few years, you’ve probably gotten… Read more

Blessed. Rest. Pause. Restoration. Savoring. Beauty. Appreciation. Goodness. These are the ways the purpose of Sabbath is shown to us. What if we celebrated Sabbath through these ideas? What if these were the touchstones for creating a Sabbath practice in our home? Read more

Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a movie about doubt. That’s clear not only from a cursory viewing but also from the trailers and press surrounding the film. And doubt, we all know, is a theme that resonates profoundly in our current cultural, spiritual, and political moment. /Spoilers, of course/ The Jesuit missionaries (played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) sent by the Church in Portugal to rescue their mentor (Liam Neeson) from impending apostasy under Japanese persecution both descend into doubt over… Read more